To have a full understanding of the motivations that gave origin to Orium Network, it's important to take a step back and contextualize the current moment we are living in the play-to-earn field.

Cambrian Explosion of Play-to-Earn Games

In the past few months, we have seen a massive adoption of play-to-earn games with the leading platform Axie Infinity registering almost 3 million daily active players. Yes, daily!

Axie Infinity reigned alone for some time but this has now changed. Some new competitors have debuted in the market and many more have promised to launch their games in the first quarter of 2022.

Along with these games came Guilds, a group of investors that organize themselves to lend valuable NFTs so that other community members can play without the need to invest in expensive digital items. Guild owners buy playable NFTs and rent them out to gamers (called Scholars) who share the rewards generated with the Guild. To dig a bit deeper into how this dynamic works, read our previous article.

A New Business Model

Building a Guild is a hot business nowadays and it is popping up all around the metaverse. But managing a Guild is not an easy task. Guild owners have to have a very good understanding of blockchain technology and a deep knowledge of the play-to-earn games they wish to support.

These challenges become exponentially more difficult as the number of games supported by Guilds increases. That's why most of the Guilds are built around a single game.

Also, many challenges arise as the number of Scholars in the Guild increases. For instance, owners have to manage a portfolio of hundreds and, eventually, thousands of NFTs in a smart way to compensate for the investments on the NFTs and the returns generated by the players. Multiple Scholarship accounts need to be managed and loaded up with tokens to pay for transaction fees. Scholars have to be very actively monitored so that they monetize properly the investment made on the NFTs they are using. Those are only a very small subset of the challenges Guild owners face.

Some games, like Pegaxy, have decided to make the Scholarship model built-in into the platform itself. Even though this solves some of the issues, like the automatic distribution of rewards, most of the problems remain. For instance, Guild owners still have to manage that portfolio with thousands of NFTs, Scholars receive one token for each game they play, transaction fees still need to be managed, etc.

Enter Orium Network

Orium Network aims at solving all of these difficulties and problems, abstracting away the technical knowledge required to manage a Guild, and providing the right tools for Guild owners to seamlessly scale their operations.

With Orium Protocol, we go even beyond solving these problems and difficulties. Orium Protocol will allow the formation of Decentralized Guilds, with multiple financial and governance features, built on top of blockchain smart contracts. Decentralized Guilds will allow investors to pool assets and collectively invest in tokens and NFTs, lending their assets to existing Defi protocols and community members.

Orium DAO is governed by $ORIUM token holders and will be responsible for voting on the format that the Platform should operate. Fees generated by the Protocol & Platform will flow to the DAO's Treasury and the DAO will decide how to best apply the funds to foster the development of the ecosystem.

The seamless integration of the many parts that form Orium Network will allow very innovative services in the space, some of which are listed below:

Guilds Launchpad: an IDO platform specifically designed to raise capital for new or existent Guilds, which can then be used to invest in NFTs and accelerate growth.

NFT backed loans: through these services, Guilds will be able to use their income-generating NFTs as collateral for loans. Orium Protocol will take care of the

Orium Marketplace: a place where guilds will be able to buy and sell bundles of NFTs and even scholarships. Normally, each game provides their marketplace for the exchange of NFTs but in all the cases, the NFTs are negotiated one by one, which becomes a big challenge for guilds that own hundreds of NFTs and want to sell some of them at a volume discount price. Orium Marketplace will allow new guilds to buy a bunch of NFTs from other guilds to start their business.

Scorecard: Orium Platform will also provide a scorecard for each player of the Guilds. The scorecard will measure a player's performance based on all the games he/she plays. For guild owners, that will be one of the most important information at hand, providing a clear view of how optimized his team of players is. Based on the scorecard, players could be "traded" in the Orium Marketplace or offer themselves to move from one guild to another one he/she feels more comfortable with.

Once we have all the infrastructure in place, many other services will come to life and we believe that many of these services will come from members of the community using our tools to innovate and be more competitive.

Orium Guild

Some of the services provided by Orium Network are already being extensively tested by our Orium Guild. In the last six months, we grew it to become one of the biggest guilds in Brazil, with over 1,000 active scholars that play daily.

Through our Orium Guild, we are learning about the needs that guild owners may have. Even though we took the care to make the leader of the Orium Guild someone separated from the leaders of the Orium Network, we know that there could be some bias toward our platform. That's why we are planning on adding at least two more guilds in 1Q22 to get as much feedback as they can provide.

$ORIUM token

The $ORIUM utility token will be the fuel that will enable all these services. It will have three main utilities. First, it will provide voting power for holders to actively participate in the governance of the Orium DAO and dictated the future of the network.

Secondly, it will be the currency used to pay the players for their in-game performance. Instead of receiving one different token for each game played, the scholars will receive $ORIUM and decide whether they will exchange it for fiat or stake some of them to help on the governance of the DAO.

$ORIUM holders will be able to lock up their tokens in the DAO to increase their voting power and receive rewards from the fees collected in the Network.

A big chunk of the $ORIUM token total supply will be directed as a reward for members of the community that participates in voting and in providing liquidity for the AMM markets.

A more technical and detailed description of the $ORIUM token will be provided in the next article. Sign up for our newsletter to stay updated about everything that happens at Orium Network.

More Information

If you enjoyed Orium Network, you may want to visit our website or read our whitepaper, in which we provide detailed information of all services we plan to offer.

Sign up for our newsletter to stay updated on the upcoming steps we are taking to make Orium Network a reality.

Introducing Orium Network was originally published in Orium Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Videogames have entertained kids and grown-ups for decades. The industry evolved significantly since the launch of smartphones, generating an estimated $180 billion of revenue globally in 2021 alone. As a whole, the gaming sector is larger than the movie and the music sectors combined.

Games went through several transformations throughout history, from the days of pixelated screens and very poor sound performance to where reality is almost perfectly mimicked. But in all those years something didn’t change: most of the value generated is pocked by a small set of studio conglomerates, while users invest a lot of time and effort receiving only entertainment as a reward.

It was only around 2005 that professional game players started to emerge. These players are extremely specialized in one game and can monetize their gameplay through alternative sources. They collect payment from sponsors, other newbie players that want to learn how to play well, online ads, among other incoming streams that are available once a brand is built.

The problem is that only a few players manage to achieve the status of a game celebrity. Most gamers will never reach such a level of recognition and will not be able to monetize all their time invested on the platform. But this is about to change as the industry is now facing its largest transformation ever: the advent of play-to-earn.

Tokens and NFTs

To understand play-to-earn, one needs to be aware of two technologies that enabled this movement: Tokens and NFTs.

Tokens can be thought of as a cryptocurrency with a slight difference: a blockchain platform has only one native cryptocurrency, but it can be home to many different Tokens. As an example, we have the Ethereum blockchain platform, whose cryptocurrency is Ether, and it’s home to thousands of other Tokens.

As cryptocurrencies, Tokens are fungible assets, which means that one unit of Token A is the same as other units of this same Token A. And Tokens, as cryptocurrencies, have a value that is determined in an open market dominated by supply and demand forces.

NFTs are a different beast. They stand for Non-Fungible Tokens and, as the name says, are non-fungible, which means that each NFT represents a unique asset, with its own set of attributes. The house you live in can be thought of as a non-fungible asset since there are no other houses exactly like it. There could be two houses very alike but at least the address will be different. NFTs represent the same idea in the digital world.

NFTs became popular in 2021, with some artists making millions of dollars selling their digital art as NFTs. Famous JPEG images Crypto Punks also hit record high sales last year, with big companies also debuting into this market.

Play-to-Earn Games

Play-to-earn games reward players for their time and performance. Each game is an entire ecosystem with its own set of Tokens and NFTs. This new monetization model is taking the industry by storm since players are now rewarded for executing an activity that they would normally perform for free!

After collecting the rewards, players are free to decide what to do with them. They can either sell them on the open market (for real money) or use them inside the game to buy tools that will improve their gameplay. Besides that, the rewards can also be used for other activities in the game, these activities being only limited by the creators’ imagination. As an example, in a very famous game called Axie Infinity, rewards can be used for breeding two characters to give birth to a third character, each character represented by an NFT.

Examples of play-to-earn games that are live today include Axie Infinity, Pegaxy, Theta Arena, Gods Unchained among many others. Axie Infinity still dominates the scene with its first-mover advantage and its 3 million daily active users. But Theta Arena is rapidly growing and may soon reach the top.

Barriers of Entry

Most of the play-to-earn games present a financial barrier to enter: they demand players to own an NFT that should be bought either inside the game or in a secondary market. As an example, to play Axie Infinity, users should own at least three Axies, which are the characters necessary to play the game. Each Axie is represented by an NFT and their price is dictated by supply and demand dynamics.

To play Axie Infinity, players should be willing to pay an average of $450 (as of the time of writing) to acquire three Axies. From an investment perspective, that's not a big deal, but from an entertainment point of view, it is a lot of money to play a mobile game. The key difference is that players have complete ownership of their in-game assets, and are free to sell, lend or use them to play.

Another relevant barrier is the knowledge required to acquire NFTs and play the game. Most users are not familiar with blockchain technology and it takes time to get your head around it and perform the many technical steps necessary to enter the game.

Enter the Guilds

The financial and technological barrier to entering these games gave birth to a whole new type of organization, commonly known as Guilds. Guilds are a group of NFT owners who lent out NFTs to other players, providing both financial and technical support throughout their gaming experience. But obviously, this does not come for free. Since Guilds are profit-driven organizations, a percentage of the player's rewards is charged as a fee in return for allowing players to use their NFTs and providing the necessary training.

Play-to-earn Guilds are a very recent phenomenon. They were firstborn in the Philippines, as this country contains the majority of play-to-earn users. But are now all over the world. There are thousands of such organizations in existence with players in every single country.

The Future of play-to-earn games

These games have already shown their value. It’s very easy to find stories in developing countries of players that are helping their families with money earned on these types of platforms.

But there is still resistance to adoption. Some countries have regulatory barriers to Tokens and NFTs, and traditional game studios tend to not want to adapt their business model, even when these changes can make a huge impact on their audience's lives.

It’s still very early for this industry and companies are still trying to figure out the best way to move forward and the best economic format for their Tokens and NFTs. Some games will disappear while others will flourish. It’s very difficult to predict what’s gonna happen in the future but one thing is almost certain: this new game model is here to stay.

A Game-Changing Revolution was originally published in Orium Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.